


the long autumn (petal to the metal)

by Anonymous



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Brother/Brother Incest, Child Neglect, Hanahaki AU, M/M, Papa Shimada’s A+ Parenting, fairly descriptive on the hanahaki, holds pretty close to canon, with that I mean there’s the actual scene from the Dragons short used
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-11
Updated: 2018-03-11
Packaged: 2019-03-29 16:48:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13931199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Genji’s used to it now. Waking up short of breath and lungs full of flowers.





	the long autumn (petal to the metal)

Genji is is eleven when he develops a persistent scratch in his throat. At the start that’s great news; he can just lie in bed and let his mother and big brother pamper him. It gets less great when his lord father calls them both away after a week of indulging him. The heir and lady of the clan have better things to do than look after the second son after all.

So he gets settled with an impersonal nurse and for the next couple of weeks he fakes getting better while actually getting worse. He doesn’t like the nurse overmuch and the scratch and cough is intermittent enough to convince her.

 

_(It isn’t until years later that he finds out why he’d been confined to bed for weeks at that time. By then he’d already forgotten all about it.)_

 

The next time he can play with Hanzo is another month away. The whole thing’s gotten worse in the meantime, making him taste rust every now and again.

That doesn’t stop him jumping on his brother though at the first chance he gets.

“Brother!” he yells at the top of his lungs. Hanzo nearly topples under his weight.

“Genji,” he answers his call, out of breath and sticky with sweat from his workout but happy to see him nonetheless. Hanzo steadies both of them for a second and promptly flips Genji over his head in revenge.

Genji flops down with a scream ending in an equally loud ‘Oof’. But the theatricals only hide his leg shooting out, crashing straight into his brother’s and making him fall sideways.

Hanzo lets himself fall, hand landing flat against the ground with a resounding smack. He takes the momentum and rolls over to pounce on Genji all in under two seconds.

They wrestle for a good couple of minutes until they’re both red in the face and exhausted to the point where they can only trade soft openhanded paps to each other.

It is then that they hear someone clear their throat. Hanzo’s head snaps up immediately while Genji can only loll his head in the general direction of the noise, chest tight and just short of a coughing fit.

Their father stands where the dojo meets the hallway, disapproving frown on his face.

 

 _(Decades pass and he’ll look back at this time and see that all_ that _was carefully crafted to drive them apart.)_

 

The first flowers bloom around two years later. The day after he consciously notices his brother training for the first time in a long while. Hanzo had started generating a lot more heat over the last couple of years and ditches his shirt whenever he can get away with it. Genji notices that then, too. Very intimately.

Now mornings have always been the worst for his body. He figures his lungs lying down for too long with not even temporary respite by way of bitten back coughs and hard breaths will do that.

So one morning when the urge gets especially bad, he turns on his stomach getting his knees and elbows under himself coughing and coughing hard for at least ten minutes until something else but the customary blood starts to come up the back of his throat. It’s big and fairly soft and choking him until it’s out on his pillow in all its blackish red glory.

Genji just stares at it for a long time. Tears in his eyes and still coughing up a storm, eyes transfixed on the deep red thing on the bedspread.

It isn’t until the fit wrecking his body finally stops that he really moves again.

He brings a shaky hand up and carefully touches a soft petal with a reverent finger. There’s a wetness he wasn’t really expecting, the flower itself red enough to make him miss the blood on it.

It’s a chrysanthemum. A deep red chrysanthemum.

His hand curls fully around it, crushing it in his fist.

 

_(Genji knew then what it was. The sickness was rare but it ran in the family. He’d heard stories of his grandmother’s sister whiling away when he was younger. She’d been kept in a storage shed on the outskirts of the compound. They’d snuck in there once, him and Hanzo, finding dried white roses hung up on strings and pressed in all kinds of books. When they asked their mother later, she gets a faraway look in her eyes and tells them about her sickness. About breathing through flowers and all that it means.)_

 

Genji’s used to it now. Waking up short of breath and lungs full of flowers.

But he’s still fifteen and terrified. All but living in a different world from the rest of his family. And he doesn’t know how that even happened. (No, that knowledge comes later.)

Maybe it’s his fault. He’d been distancing himself since the sickness started. ‘Sleeping in’ longer to clean up the blood and take care of the flowers. Taking to the arcade more than their compound, because for some reason distance seemed to help. Only really seeing the other people living in their mansion when they eat supper and only because his father grabbed his arm hard enough to bruise and told him to be there.

He stays as far away from Hanzo as he can get because being near him brings only pain.

Hanzo only corners him once. Early in the morning one day. At least it's after he'd already cleaned up.

He bangs on the door. Genji in his youthful optimism acutally opens it.

“Genji,” Hanzo says, no real inflection in his voice, smile long gone after years of his father’s tutelage.

“Brother,” Genji answers, looking down, desperately sucking on his teeth to get the blood out of the spaces between them.

“I would like you to train with me,” all diction and articulation, staring straight at Genji’s hairline where it’s starting to grow out of its bleached blond.

“Ah,” Genji says, eyes traveling up and getting caught by Hanzo’s Adam’s apple, “Sorry, but I have a prior engagement.” also all diction, too nervous _not_ to fall back on the training his father made them both go through.

There is a long pause where Genji can see his Adam’s apple jump and bob, then he says, “Alright,” dipping his chin and cutting of his line of sight.

Genji’s eyes bound up, meeting Hanzo’s and he can’t look away, “Sorry,” he repeats, stilted, trying to swallow but hitting a roadblock on the way. There’s only so much he can do not to cough suddenly.

Hanzo blinks but it doesn’t break the spell, only getting him caught up in his long, dark, curling leashes.

“Yes,” Hanzo looks away, centering his eyes firmly on the ground. “Maybe another time.”

He turns away and walks.

“Maybe another time,” Genji says quietly to the empty hallway.

That’s the last Genji hears from him for some time.

 

_(Sometimes he wonders if everything could have been alright if he’d taken Hanzo up on the offer. Then he remembers the systematic nature of the clan and stops.)_

 

He doesn’t really know when or how the flower’s colors change but the fact is that when he wakes up on his seventeenth birthday the chrysanthemums are a pale pink beneath his blood, lighter than even the sakura blooming around their compound.

This is the day their father dies.

Two months later his brother comes calling late one night.

Now Genji would have thought this to be a dream, and a good one at that, if not for the look on Hanzo’s face.

“Follow me,” he says without inflection already walking away. Knowing he’ll be heeded.

Genji’s just starved enough for him to actually do so.

They walk over to the entrance hall, Hanzo kneels down in front of the  _yojijukugo_ so Genji follows suit leaving them both facing the shrine.

They don’t talk for a while, then, “The clan elders told me to kill you.”

Genji stiffens, hands clenched in his lap. He takes a deep breath and lets it out in a sigh. Another pause.

“Will you do it then, brother? Will you kill me?”

Hanzo lays a hand on his shoulder, heedless of the current running through Genji’s body at the touch.

“I do what I must,” Hanzo says, a nearly unnoticeable tremor on the last word.

A cough builds up in Genji’s throat and this time he lets it come out, nice and red down his front. He sags against Hanzo’s side.

If he’s to die, at least he can have that.

Genji shuts his eyes. He doesn’t see the lost look crossing Hanzo’s face.

What he does notice is Hanzo’s hand pressing against his chest and getting all red. The hand wanders down and Genji’s eyes snap open.

Hanzo cups the flower that he didn’t even know fell out of his lips and brings it up between them. The chrysanthemum is nearly white now, making his blood stand out that much more.

Hanzo sneaks an arm around his shoulder, pulling him firmly against his chest.

Genji coughs, quietly this time small shudders rattling his body. He closes his eyes again.

There is the sound of a sword leaving its scabbard. It’s a sound he’s very familiar with.

Genji presses his forehead into the crook of Hanzo’s neck.

The quiet presses down on them.

Then pain explodes.

 

_(Blackwatch is a dark time for him. Then again it was a dark time for everyone involved. He’d entered it at a dark time.)_

 

The resentment stays for years. Genji knew since he was thirteen that he wouldn’t live to see thirty but he also didn’t want to die so soon. To have his time with his brother cut off so abruptly.

It’s also transferral; all his frustration with himself for not using his time and the clan settling on Hanzo for the first couple of months.

For all Hanzo was the one who held the blade he wasn’t the one who killed him. That falls on the clan elders after all.

And anyways even for all the resentment he felt he never let them remove the flowers.

 

_(The worst pain was when he got his tattoo, strain exacerbated by the pain. He couldn’t even breathe funny, his family was watching so close.)_

 

Oh, no. Maybe the worst is right now when he sees his brother kneeling in front of the only memorial their father ever saw fit to give to him. Some of his blood they couldn’t get out of the heirloom  _yojijukugo_ above the chipped sword that was meant for Hanzo. The sword he killed him with.

Hanzo takes out a bowl, a small stand and a single sparrow feather and lines them up neatly in front of him. He burns some incense and puts the sticks into the stand as he starts to speak. They fight. With bodies and with hands when all Genji really wanted to do was tell Hanzo he forgave him when he got here.

But maybe Hanzo needs something else.

Their dragons fly in a way Genji hasn’t let himself since he last walked the clan’s halls. It is only fitting it would happen here again.

Hanzo falls to his knees.

Genji takes off his mask, his face beneath it uneven with necrosis and scars, and lets a single flower slide from what’s left of his mouth framed by metal.

The chrysanthemum is pure white now, his blackened blood oil mixture in stark contrast to it.

Genji has made his peace with the world. Hanzo still has problems with it, with himself and maybe with Genji, too.

But that’s alright. Genji’s waited more than a decade already. He can wait some more.

 

_(It’s only peace that his master Zenyatta taught.)_

 

All of Overwatch had been recalled so Genji answers. Maybe he can do something good this time. As an actual part of the team.

He gets to base and the first thing he sees is of course McCree leaning against the entrance, smoking one of his fat cigars looking out at the reddening sky.

Genji doesn’t make a sound but after a second or two McCree’s eyes leave the horizon and land squarely on him.

McCree grins, “Howdy, partner,” he greets in his drawl, walking over to Genji.

“Yo,” Genji answers, projecting as much warmth into his voice as he can. He takes the hand that is offered and while a bit surprised at the pull, returns McCree’s embrace.

They fall into an easy camaraderie they hadn't had at the end of the old Overwatch. They get the same bunks Blackwatch used, a bit away from the others. Well, he might be overselling it a little with ‘bunks’. Blackwatch normally just slept where they crashed, on the chairs of the nearest meeting room or some easily defensible part of the ground. Now Winston actually put some very comfortable couches in meeting room four. Even if Genji can’t really feel too much more than some pressure through his armor plates, at least it’ll be more comfortable for McCree.

One evening he’s making his way back alone after game night with Doctor Ziegler and some of the original strike team. McCree had begged out of it in favor of a night in town. Or well the next town-ish conglomeration of houses that had a bar.

It isn’t until the bridge after the general barracks where he’d bid goodbye to the rest of the team that he notices the nearly silent footsteps following him.

He stops walking and says, “If you've come to kill me, know that better men have tried,” not overloud into the darkness.

Something falls through the air and lands quietly.

Hanzo stands up before him.

Traditional clothing traded in for a leather jacket and joggers. He has piercings now. Genji thinks he himself would look similar had he aged.

“Hello,” Hanzo says, stance communicating discomfort but his gaze steady on Genji's visor.

Genji meets his eyes and slowly reaches out.


End file.
